


Hybrid

by SleepsWithCoyotes



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M, Naga x Human, Predators Being Predators, Snakes, Tentacles, Transformation, Violent Demise of Snack Foods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-03-26
Packaged: 2018-10-10 22:42:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10449168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SleepsWithCoyotes/pseuds/SleepsWithCoyotes
Summary: Wheat and wheat by-products. Turns out that's still a thing.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Archiving old fic from 2013 - I actually haven't listened since ep 33, from the looks of things, so everything I post will likely be terribly non-canon-compliant. No comment spoilers, please--I do intend to get caught up!
> 
> I am seriously going to blame Star Trek that I even know what triticale is. XD Also, this was supposed to be goofy, porny crack. I have no idea what the hell happened. D: (Plus, I was already thinking about writing this before I went out and bought a snake and named it Carlos, swear to god. It honestly doesn't take much to get me writing tentasnakeporn, and the wheat and wheat by-products were _right there._ )
> 
> There is an instance of a transformed Carlos getting his snack on, but I feel like I would maybe be giving the wrong impression if I tagged for animal death, so. Read responsibly!

The first time he left Night Vale, it was only intended to be a quick jaunt over to the nearest town with a post office and a zip code that didn't make customer support hang up on him. His plans were simple: rent a post office box, buy a newspaper or two, walk into the middle of the library if they had one and just _breathe._ It shouldn't have taken long at all.

Because the town was tiny, the directions he got at the post office pointed him towards city hall; the library, he was told, was a satellite crammed into a single large room there, grateful to have that.

"Does it smell like books?" he asked, forgetting for a moment where he was.

The postmaster stared at him for a long, uncomfortable moment. "Crap," he said at last. "You're from Night Vale, aren't you?"

"Er, a transplant. I mean, not originally," he was quick to correct when the man went pale. "I, uh...come in peace?"

It was a nice day outside. He decided to hoof it.

Strolling along with his hands in his pockets, thinking only of the drive back, he was completely unprepared for ambush or torture. He didn't make it two blocks.

There was a bakery between the post office and the library, and the smell of it hit him with a Pavlovian response so strong it was like _mind control._ A rush of saliva filled his mouth as his stomach _twisted_ with hunger, growling so loudly an elderly couple walking by eyed him askance and edged out of his way. "Night Vale," the old woman whispered, a little more loudly than she probably realized. The old man nodded slowly, eyes fixed on Carlos until they were safely past.

It was a bad idea. A very bad idea. He'd gone a little over nine months without tasting bread. God. _Nine months without._ He could just...keep...walking.

Right into the bakery.

What followed wasn't pretty.

Afterwards, Carlos sat in his car, flushed with embarrassment and smug satiation, feeling like a lion basking on the savannah with a belly full of wildebeest. It was probably hot enough out to pass for savannah, but that was beside the point. Belatedly it occurred to him that going home--back to Night Vale, that was--probably wasn't a good idea at the time, at least not until his casual flirtation with felonious gluttony had digested. He'd already determined that wheat and wheat by-products from outside Night Vale gained the same murderous properties at random after crossing some indefinable border, even after the Great Wheat Vanishment; the odds currently ran approximately one loaf per hundred. What he didn't know was what happened if that one in a hundred loaf crossed the border in a masticated state.

It wasn't so much that he had any particular aversion to snake as a meal choice, but he'd rather not find out the hard way that the _masticated_ state didn't stick any better than the _bread_ part did.

"That took a while," Morris observed when Carlos returned to the lab at last. Morris had been puttering with a floating roof tile, supposedly ripped off the invisible, teleporting clock tower in the last windstorm, but he gave Carlos his full attention, looking him over with a concerned frown. "Run into any trouble?"

Carlos shook his head with a guilty smile, wishing he could have brought something back. "Just, uh...had to dispose of the evidence of my crimes."

Morris looked wistful. "The place two blocks from the post office?"

"Oh, God, yes," Carlos groaned, more loudly and more...devoutly than he'd intended.

In the far corner, Lindquist looked up from a snarl of wires and shiny steel parts with a jerk. "Huh?" he asked, looking distractedly around. "Oh. No Cecil?"

"Urk," Carlos managed while Morris, sputtering, clapped a hand over his mouth.

Blinking his eyes back into focus, Lindquist stared blankly at Carlos for a moment then grinned. "So I guess I don't need to clear out for a few hours."

"I'm leaving now," Carlos announced loudly, suiting action to words.

"You're supposed to hang a sock on the doorknob, I think!" Lindquist called after him cheerfully as Morris lost the battle to contain his laughter.

And to think he'd felt bad for not smuggling them back any baked goods.

He'd just have to be sneaky about it, that was all.

***

Sneaky, as it turned out, was a relative term.

After the Jellyfish Incident, he'd made a point of going down to City Hall and getting documentation of every law and city ordinance governing scientific research, public or private. He'd been dismayed to learn that the Sheriff's Secret Police could seize anything considered forbidden or dangerous, up to and including weapons of mass destruction, feverish scribblings and temporal lobes. He'd merely been perplexed when he'd realized the town had been donating their broken clocks for dissection because _all_ broken technology was something they, as scientists, apparently had dibs on. The law even said so. In exactly those words.

He'd also found the one clause he'd been looking for, which he was exploiting now.

"And a loaf of the sourdough, please," he said, smiling away as the confused woman at the bakery plucked a still-warm loaf out of the display case and placed it nervously--"no bag, no wrapper, thanks--it needs to be clearly visible"--in the fifteenth heavy-duty airtight container he'd lined up on the counter. Sealing it quickly, he wrote in big block letters: SOURDOUGH, BAKED. MEDICAL RESEARCH SPECIMEN. NO C.I.T.E.S. EXPORT. "And that should do it," he said brightly, capping his Sharpie with a flourish. "So, what do I owe you?"

"Thirty, uh...thirty-three fifty?"

He handed her two twenties with a smile. "Keep the change."

***

Out of the first fifteen loaves, not one of them transformed. It was frighteningly good odds.

Expecting the curt knock on the lab's front door, he left his team hovering over the still-sealed containers and went to greet the pair of deputies looming just outside with a light step and a clipboard in hand. "Gentlemen," he greeted them, waving them inside as they traded uneasy looks, clearly knocked off their stride. "You're just in time. If you'll each sign one of these medical releases, we can begin."

The taller one narrowed his eyes. "Releases?"

"We're performing experiments," Carlos said evenly. "For science. And right now we're in the human testing phase."

In the end it was as simple as that.

***

" _Carlos_ ," Cecil moaned, a sound Carlos generally quite enjoyed, except that this time it was more of an indication of terror and disbelief than heartfelt approval. " _Tell_ me you're not running a wheat and wheat by-product speakeasy out of your lab!"

"Of course not," Carlos assured him earnestly. "It's just science. Come on, look--this is fascinating," he said, pulling a reluctant Cecil deeper into the lab. "We've had a few metamorphoses since we started the experiment, and we've been keeping those securely tanked, but we've _also_ been studying them in relation to the staleage rate of loaf samples of same-day freshness. Now from what we can tell, wheat-snake decomposition in a sealed environment progresses at the same rate as bread kept in a plastic bag, but when the tanks are well-ventilated, the snake's scales eventually harden until it becomes completely immobile, at an identical rate as bread baked on the same--"

"Science," Cecil echoed with a perplexed stare. "You really are doing science."

Carlos ducked his head with a guilty smile. "Well," he admitted, "we are asking for volunteers for a slightly different study...."

He'd heard that catch in Cecil's breath before, the hint of a different sort of hunger when he said, "Sign me up."

***

He might have gotten a little careless after that. Not with his sample containment, and certainly not with his paperwork; the latter he kept up with in triplicate, dutifully sending both the Sheriff's Secret Police and the City Council copies of every consent form he gathered. He also included weekly updates on his research, captivated almost despite himself by the possibility of cracking the wheat and wheat by-product problem. He'd even gotten them to release the citizens quarantined the previous year after a few simple blood tests and a bloodstone test that was _not_ so simple, but which he'd thankfully had nothing to do with.

Where his caution began to fail him was in the scope of the samples he collected. Stopping for gas one day on the way to the bakery, he noticed a Hostess display and ran back out to his car to grab a sterile container. It wasn't until he was within shouting distance of the welcome sign at the city limits that he came to his senses, slammed on the brakes, and did a frantic U-turn in the middle of Route 800. Sweat beading on his brow, he drove as far and as fast as he could in the opposite direction, hands shaking with relief when he pulled that container out of the trunk and found nothing but a dozen snack packs of donettes in three different flavors.

"Fuck," he breathed as he dumped them out onto the rock and sand on the side of the road, stomping them flat for good measure. He knew better than this.

_Hostess donettes never went bad._ What had he been about to bring into the world?

He resisted the urge to deviate even slightly from his scheduled, by-now boring trips to the bakery for weeks. He even brought back a loaf of rye, which he could have found on any given day at the Ralph's, just to be on the safe side. He only went into the town's tiny grocery store because he was running low on bottled water for his emergency kit, and no one with half an ounce of survival sense drove anywhere in the desert without water on hand.

That someone in town was a health food nut became blatantly obvious when he passed by an entire shelf of Bob's Red Mill products.

Almond flour, rice flour, gluten-free pizza crust mix, gluten-free _brownie_ mix. Yellow cornmeal, blue cornmeal, corn grits polenta. Seven grain hot cereal. Five grain rolled cereal. Rolled oats. Rolled _triticale._

"Triticale?" Carlos blurted incredulously. They'd made a breakfast cereal out of a high-yield, disease-resistant crop whose best use was improving the economy and nutrition of developing countries? Christ, it wasn't even gluten-free, being a hybrid of wheat and--

He took a quick step back, shoving his hands into his pockets, but...the bag was _right there._

It didn't even turn into anything when he crossed back over Night Vale's invisible border.

***

He'd heard somewhere that madness was repeating the same experiment over and over and expecting different results, but in Night Vale, that was just good sense. Instead of adding the bag of triticale to the _other_ study--the one where Cecil, Big Rico, and several members of the Sheriff's Secret Police got together for lunch once a week with Carlos and his team--he held it back from circulation, performing test after test on miniscule amounts. The three-foot snakes created by even a plain white loaf of Wonder Bread--which was barely _bread_ to begin with--were hell to contain, even now that they'd stopped turning into malevolent spirits three hours after the initial transformation. With any luck, his tiny samples would turn into equally-tiny snakes if he managed to activate them at all.

He was down to half a bag and his last petri dish when he decided he really was just being paranoid.

Straightening from his slump at his workstation, he pulled off his safety goggles and raised his arms in a spine-cracking stretch. Realizing belatedly that the lights over his area were the only ones still lit, he lifted grainy eyes to the wall clock and realized it was nearly two in the morning. God, Cecil was going to murder him; he'd worked late three nights this week already, hadn't even stopped by the station to see him on his break. He'd have to call first thing in the morning, grovel most earnestly, maybe promise him dinner--

His own stomach decided just then to make its own displeasure known, growling so loudly he would have been embarrassed if anyone had heard. Groaning as he stood on tingling legs for the first time in hours, he went over to examine the lab fridge--labeled clearly to differentiate it from the break room fridge that would never dream of containing wheat or its by-products--without much hope. Just as he'd suspected, the last of the muffins were gone. He already knew the break room would be empty of anything edible, which just left....

He glanced at his worktable, his collection of inert experiments, and winced as his stomach wrung itself like a dish towel.

Fine. He wasn't the biggest fan of breakfast foods, but short of breaking into Big Rico's next door, that half-bag of triticale was the closest thing to a meal on hand.

It wasn't the first time he'd cooked up dinner--or breakfast, or blinner, or whatever the technical name was for the meal you had at two in the morning to stave off starvation--in a beaker. It wasn't even the first time he'd made oatmeal in a lab. Fetching a few packs of sugar, a plastic spoon and two non-dairy creamers from the break room, he found himself thinking almost fondly of his undergrad days.

Stirring carefully and constantly as he waited for his dinner to cook, Carlos propped an elbow on his worktable and his cheek on his fist and sighed moodily into the silence. It'd be easier if Cecil really would get mad enough to kill him over his sporadic bouts of neglect, but mostly Cecil would be hurt. Whenever Cecil _did_ get furious, it usually came out on the show, and that...really wasn't working for them, because Cecil was the type to vent and then forget it. He just never seemed to aim his grievances at Carlos where Carlos could actually answer them, work out what Cecil needed and nail down a clear set of rules for himself, like _sanitize between handlings_ or _never leave your station without putting away your tools,_ or _goodbye kisses are not negotiable._

He was _good_ at rules. He was just very, very bad at asking for them, suspecting they were something most people just knew.

Realizing he was on the verge of needing a pint of Ben & Jerry's more than a beaker of oatmeal, Carlos shook himself out of his funk and removed his impromptu dinner from the heat, adding sugar and not-milk to taste. He'd eat and clean up fast, go home, and make a promise to talk to Cecil properly in the morning. Maybe he could convince Cecil to come over for breakfast; waiting until lunch might be cutting things close. He might even have to make a pot of hybrid oatmeal for Cecil; the triticale he'd been shoveling down was surprisingly--

Carlos froze, spoon half raised to his mouth, breathing shallowly through his parted lips. Had he felt...something...move?

Eyes tracking slowly down, he stared at his right thigh. Under the cotton-polyester blend of his light khakis, under his _skin,_ something rippled from his hip to his knee.

He dropped the spoon, fell off his lab stool and scuttled mindlessly back, kicking at nothing and frantically brushing himself down. What _was_ that, what the _fuck_ was that, and where was it now?

Fetching up against a cabinet hard enough to rattle the doors, he set his back to cool metal and tore at his belt with both hands. Off, Christ, he had to get them off--pants, boxers, _shoes,_ only those were falling off on their own, socks losing their shape and stretching off in crazy angles as his legs...split. Branched. _Uncoiled._

He didn't quite scream then because he couldn't get any breath, no matter how fast his chest hitched for the slightest scrap of air. His body was dissolving right before his eyes, the transformation into a writhing knot of greenish-brown serpents proceeding rapidly. Already it had spread from his stomach to his guts and down into his legs, and it was only a matter of time before it reversed course and made its way upwards. It'd be his lungs next and then his heart--he was going to _die_ here--and he could only hope the others figured out what had happened to him before any of them tried eating the same batch. _Human trials._ What the _fuck_ had they been thinking?

What the hell had he _done?_

While he still had hands, he scrabbled his phone out of his pocket, fumbling it twice in his hurry. He had to warn someone. Quickly, God, if he could just get his fingers to work, and he hit the speed dial only to realize he'd called Cecil and not Morris.

Cecil. _God._

He went to voice mail, and that never happened unless Cecil was on the air. Angry with him, then, with good reason, but it made his heart clench up with a tearing ache behind his ribs. "Cecil," he said in a wavering voice, swallowing hard. "Cecil, this is im...." The words hung in his throat. Closing his eyes, he dropped his head and breathed, "Cecil, this is bad. Please. Get to the lab as soon as you hear this and make sure nobody ingests _anything,_ especially not the triticale. I'll destroy it if I have time, but...the lab might be...infested by the time anyone gets here."

Though his throat was closing up on a grief he didn't have time for, at least his heart was starting to slow. He could still do what needed to be done.

"This is what's important. I love you," he said, voice breaking at the last. "I'm sorry."

He hung up and turned his phone off before setting it carefully down on the floor beside him. Staring down at what had been his legs, he felt a bubble of hysterical laughter quiver through him as he realized it wasn't snake _heads_ he was seeing; it was snake tails. The transformation was taking its cue from his body's own blueprint, orienting his killers properly. The strange thing was, they didn't actually hurt; he didn't feel like he'd been ripped apart, just...different. When the thick coils rubbed against each other--and they were always moving--he felt everything they did, as if they were still a part of him, his nerves still connected. Maybe it wouldn't hurt at all when the transformation finished.

Even if it certainly was taking its time.

Frowning, Carlos lifted a shaking hand and forced himself to press, unhappily but firmly, against the flat plane of his abdomen. Instantly his stomach hitched a warning, not because it hurt, but because that didn't feel anything _like_ him: too hard, too muscular, too smooth. It felt like the belly scales of a snake, all the way down in an unbroken sheet to his...to where the juncture of his legs _had_ been, and where he was now split into at least a dozen restless limbs.

When he slid his hand back up, it was hard to tell precisely where scale ended and skin began without looking, and he didn't want to look. But as the minutes passed and nothing changed, he began to think that maybe he'd better.

He didn't unbutton his shirt. Gingerly lifting the edge, he rucked it up just far enough to see that-- _God,_ he had a _ventral slit,_ and he was _not thinking about that,_ and--he was essentially human from the bottom of his ribs up. And the scale pattern wasn't climbing any higher.

Numbly he let his shirt fall again. Losing everything he'd ever eaten into the nearest wastebasket became a distinct possibility. Was that it--had he not consumed enough of the hybrid grain to complete the transformation? Or was it its hybrid nature itself that had left _him_ a hybrid in turn?

"Oh, God," he breathed, choking on it. "I...."

He wasn't going to die. He was going to live. _Like this._

Panic set in immediately, but it was a controlled one. Bolting upright, he made a clumsy lunge for his worktable and nearly fell flat on his face when his strange, coiling limbs bore him up instead of dragging him down. He'd expected to have to drag himself along by his elbows, but the orders to his body were still coming from his own familiar brain, and the human in him voted for upright locomotion. The two-thirds of him that was anything _but_ human complied as best it could.

He gathered up the triticale samples first and shoved them all into the incinerator, containers and all. Better to destroy everything than risk cross-contamination. Hesitating over the other experiments, he decided reluctantly to leave them alone; they were doing good work with the data they'd collected, and no one was going to _eat_ a data point. Not after it'd been molding or going stale for a few weeks. He typed up a quick and dirty report next, braced himself to snap a handful of pictures while that was printing, and left everything laying out in the open, lights on, waiting for whoever arrived.

Somewhere on the quiet street outside, the muffled roar of a speeding engine was drawing closer, brakes squealing to a halt with a familiar whine. He was out of time.

Tearing out the door and down the hall, he raced to the side of the lab that faced the alley between them and Big Rico's and threw open the window, grateful for the first time that the lab was just a rental and not a proper secure facility.

Eeling out into the warm night air as Cecil began pounding on the lab's front door, he took off down the alley as fast as his altered limbs could carry him, knowing only that he had to get away.

***

Carlos' phone was still sitting on the floor.

"What about his house?" Lindquist was asking, glancing worriedly around the room. "Has anyone checked there?"

"It's the first place we'd look," Morris said, shaking his head.

"So maybe that's the first place he'd go! I mean, if it's the first place we'd look, it should be the _last_ place we'd look, so--"

"He's not going to be there," Reilly said flatly.

Carlos' phone. It was just sitting there. Cecil had no idea why no one had picked it up.

"How can you be sure?" Teasdale asked with a frown.

"I got a look at the surveillance footage."

Cecil bent slowly to retrieve it, bones creaking. He felt positively ancient.

"How did you...? Right," Morris said brusquely, "never mind. And what you saw was...?"

"He wasn't thinking clearly when he left here," Reilly said, mouth tight. "In fact, I'd be willing to bet he didn't stop running until he hit the sand wastes, if then."

"Shit," Lindquist cursed, rubbing a hand over his uncombed hair, already sticking up in electric tufts.

"It's going to be dawn in a little over an hour," Borowicz reminded.

Morris blew out a heavy breath. "All right. I'll get the first aid kit. Load up the gas cans and the Pedialyte, and we'll head out."

"I'm going with you," Cecil said before the knot of scientists could break apart. He didn't know if he should expect an argument--he suspected that to them his show was just a show--but he was prepared to counter one if they tried.

Morris only nodded. "Are you riding with me or Reilly?"

***

Carlos hadn't even considered that he was running straight into trouble at first. He hadn't cared where he ended up, and if he had thought twice, he would likely have told himself that he was running--if you could call it that--in a straight line. It ought to be easy to retrace his...steps. But he hadn't been thinking about returning at the time. He still wasn't. It was just a shock to realize he was deep in the desert with no water, no food, and no idea where he was.

The only positive thing in this entire situation was that the heat actually felt pleasant for once. He supposed that'd be some comfort when he died of dehydration.

Lifting both hands to slick his hair back from his face, Carlos turned toward the early morning sun and breathed out a slow, mostly-steady sigh. Most of his initial panic had faded; now his shakiness was mainly exhaustion. He was getting too old to be pulling a week's worth of all-nighters, and adrenaline had burned through the last of his reserves hours ago. If he didn't know exactly how badly he needed to find water, he would have found some meager patch of shade somewhere and curled up to sleep, rising sun and blistering heat be damned.

As it was some tiny part of him wondered why he was bothering. It was just a feeling, not even clear enough to be put into words, but it clung sticky and soft in the back of his thoughts, refusing to vanish when he pushed it away.

Taking a deep breath, Carlos gathered himself to push on and--froze, lips parting with a frown. There was a...tickle, a _tang_ in the air that his nose couldn't quite pick up, but when he rolled the air over his tongue, he could practically taste it. Moisture. Water.

Hand flying to his mouth suspiciously, he felt over the tip of his tongue and found nothing unusual at all, but...he really could taste water. East and a little bit to the north. He wasn't sure what he was even looking for--the taste was very faint--and when he found it he nearly turned and walked-- _ha_ \--in the other direction.

It was the smallest spring he'd ever seen, nothing but a shallow depression in the sand at the foot of a pile of loose rocks, but cool, clear water bubbled up regardless with the familiar low pressure of the drinking fountains in Mission Grove Park.

If _that_ was east, then all things being relative, Night Vale should lie a hair to the northeast of where he stood.

What the hell was going on?

Deciding for once not to question, Carlos lowered himself down on his appalling new limbs and dipped the tip of a cautious finger into the spring. His skin didn't immediately sizzle or dissolve, which gave weight to the theory that it might actually be water, and it tasted neither alkaline nor salty nor particularly poisonous. Deciding he didn't have much to lose--there went that sneaking, wordless feeling again--he dipped a hand in next and drank deeply.

"Huh," he said as he lifted his head. It really was water.

Jerky movement in the corner of his eye had him freezing completely, even the restless coiling of his once-legs falling still. Turning his head very carefully, he sighed out shallowly in relief; it was nothing but a small, speckled lizard coming to investigate the spring. Nothing to worry about at all; it was perfectly harmless.

Hand shooting out almost faster than he could track, he snatched the small, struggling thing up and squeezed it tight, tighter, mouth flooded and stomach snarling. Barely waiting for it to stop moving, he crammed it into his mouth and tipped his head back, swallowing once, twice, again, a grateful moan choked off until the bulk of it slid down into his wretchedly hollow stomach.

The instant he realized what he'd done, he twisted to the side and heaved, his guts trying to turn themselves inside out. Eyes burning, he hiccupped around a horrified sob and for a moment was left strangling, lungs demanding air and the contents of his stomach demanding exit, the rest of him caught in the middle. _Helpless._

Every muscle clenching tight, he dug his fingers into the sand and dust and closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and swallowed everything back down. It didn't want to stay, bile burning the back of his throat, but he was a scientist, damn it. The circle of life didn't exactly hold any mysteries and--

It wasn't because he was a scientist. Science had _gotten_ him here. He just refused to give up.

"Oh, fuck, that's disgusting," he gasped anyway once he was certain his impromptu breakfast would stay where he'd put it. Just because he didn't have any immediate plans for death by starvation, that didn't mean he had to enjoy it.

All right. Compromise time. If he wanted to escape a steady diet of raw lizards, then running off to become the wild snake-man of the sand wastes was clearly not a viable career choice. And considering he'd run from _Night Vale_ in this condition, he obviously hadn't been thinking properly at the time. If he'd had the sense to stay put, he'd most likely have found himself the sole resident of the wheat and wheat by-product quarantine camp behind Mission Grove Park, but things could always be worse. At least they'd give him a radio there.

It wasn't really Night Vale that he'd run from.

Breathing out a sigh and coughing as his acid-sore throat protested, he looked down and made himself _see_ the changes in his body, forcing himself to catalog them as a disinterested observer. The one thing he noticed immediately was that his...limbs weren't as identical to the wheat-snakes back at the lab as he'd thought. His scales were much darker for one thing, the green an iridescent patina over the brown of his own skin tones, three shades darker still on their undersides. For another thing they were...smooth? Healthy? Natural, if he didn't think too closely about the fact that they were attached to him, whereas everything about the wheat-snakes grated on the eyes, subtly hideous in a way he'd never been able to pin down. His own snaking limbs were almost organic by comparison.

"Hybrid," he reminded himself, wondering just how much that fact had affected the outcome. He regretted destroying the samples now, though at the time he'd been too afraid someone else--God, Cecil--would make the same mistake he had.

As hard as he'd traveled, there wasn't a single mark of wear on his coils, though he was both sore and tired. Thick-skinned, though, which he supposed he'd need to be, because if his team didn't run screaming at the sight of him, he just _knew_ they were going to rechristen him Ursula. Eventually. Maybe after they got done running and screaming and came sheepishly back with clipboards and digital recorders.

"Looks like I've made up my mind already," he muttered, poking resignedly at one of his coils. As thick around as his bicep, it had to stretch a good six feet, but the place where his finger rested felt exactly like the top of his thigh, just to the left of the bone. Utterly familiar. Maybe someone else in town could tell him whether that was normal or not, in a manner of speaking, because yes, he was definitely going back.

He couldn't leave Cecil thinking he might be dead. Once was too many times already.

***

Cecil had stared for hours at the shadows on the bedroom ceiling and the shapes passing headlights threw, but it didn't help. Even in the dark, his eyes still burned with sunspots, green and indigo starbursts that flared even brighter when he closed his scratchy eyes. They'd searched the day through, Cecil calling in for his shift at the station for the first time in years, but they hadn't found a trace of Carlos anywhere.

Gods, if he'd just picked up his phone when he'd heard it ring instead of letting it go to voice mail. He'd known what Carlos was like before they started dating. The man had worked through _Valentine's Day,_ without the aid of earplugs or a bunker. He could hardly complain that Carlos was married to his work when Cecil himself couldn't even remember how to request a personal day; he'd had to ask an intern.

Lifting a trembling hand, he covered his prickling eyes and drew in a deep, slow breath. He refused to break down over this. It wasn't like he was giving up; he'd join the search again tomorrow. One more day, and then he'd go back to the station and alert the town, incite them to form search parties. It might...limit Carlos' options a tad if he couldn't science his way out of the quarantine camp, but better detained than....

Carlos couldn't be dead. He just couldn't.

Used to the nocturnal wanderings of the faceless old woman who lived in his apartment, he ignored the tired creak of the floorboards out in the hall. When he heard her creep into the bedroom, he kept his hand plastered over his eyes, hoping she'd take the hint that while he appreciated her concern, he wasn't in the mood for company. Usually she was sensitive to these things, but tonight she came closer, not stopping until she was standing, maybe crouching, right beside his bed.

He could hear her breathing. He'd never been able to before. And she--gods, she must have found one of Carlos' shirts, or his aftershave, because she smelled just like--

The hand that settled over his own and kept his eyes covered was warm and callused and very strong, always stronger than Cecil expected when they looked so refined.

"Cecil," Carlos murmured just inches from his ear, thinking him asleep, but when Cecil tried to lunge up into his arms, Carlos' other hand pinned Cecil's shoulder to the bed before he could move an inch. "Shit," Carlos breathed, voice going strained. "Cecil, wait. _Please._ "

" _Carlos,_ " he managed through a throat half-closed, torn between fury and relief. "You _bastard._ Do you know how scared I've been? Gods, let me _up_ already--"

"No," Carlos said tightly, hand twitching over Cecil's own.

Cecil frowned. What...? Oh. _Oh._ "Carlos," he said gently, "I already know--"

"Knowing isn't seeing." He was using his Science voice, the one that said he'd already figured the odds to the twelfth decimal and found them dismal, the one Cecil had learned to listen to when what it was really saying was: _You terrify me._ He just couldn't tell in this particular instance whether Carlos was more afraid for Cecil or of him. "Listen. I just...this was my stupidity, and I don't know if I can fix it. But I wanted you to know that I'm...alive, and that I'm...you know...."

"You're not fine," Cecil disagreed solemnly, hearing what Carlos was trying and failing to say.

Carlos' shaky inhale sounded so loud in the dark. "No," he admitted softly. "I'm...very much not fine."

The silence stretched an endless moment until Cecil gently tugged against the hold Carlos had on his hand. Carlos resisted, but Cecil was patient, slowly sliding his hand free and giving Carlos time to settle his own into place. He kept his eyes closed the entire time, but once Carlos' palm was cupped over his face, he couldn't resist fluttering his lids against that gentle pressure, just to feel him there.

He slid his hand along Carlos' arm, up to his shoulder, waiting breathlessly to see if Carlos would stop him. They'd showed him the pictures back at the lab, but none of them knew whether the changes had simply continued more slowly after Carlos had fled. The contours of Carlos' arm felt normal enough under the rumpled layers of his lab coat and shirt, and though he tensed as Cecil's hand crept higher, Carlos didn't push him away.

The skin of Carlos' throat was a little cool, but nights in the desert got chilly. The rasp of stubble against Cecil's skin was comfortingly human, and inch by inch Carlos' familiar features resolved under his fingertips: the square sturdiness of his jaw; his high, sculpted cheekbones; the feathery arch of permanently-quirked brows and the regal straightness of his nose. When he slid his hand into the tousled mess of Carlos' perfect hair, he hummed contentedly, pulling Carlos down.

Carlos gave automatically to the urging of his fingers, but only for a moment. "Cecil," he protested, startled.

Cecil shook his head, careful not to dislodge Carlos' hand. "Carlos. It's all right. Please."

He tugged gently, not letting up until Carlos leaned hesitantly down, only to balk at the last minute. It was a struggle to lie still and calm with Carlos' breath warm on his lips, so very close.

The first brush was so light he might have thought he imagined it if he hadn't felt Carlos' head dip that last inch under his hand. Cecil smiled--he couldn't have helped that--but he forced himself to wait as Carlos leaned in another fraction, mouth relaxing slowly at Cecil's delicate nudge. Carlos was as warm as ever as he opened to Cecil's kiss, tongue hot and slick and unchanged as it tangled with Cecil's own. It was the same broad shoulders Cecil clutched as he sighed out a moan, pulling Carlos closer to him, but the dip of the bed under Carlos' hip never came.

Cecil didn't tense, didn't let on by so much as a twitch that he thought anything was strange, but gods, he wished Carlos would uncover his eyes. He wanted to see for himself the changes Carlos thought made him so hideous, prepared to argue him into the ground. At least Cecil had a measure of distance from what had happened, had had a full day to rearrange the shape of his lover in his mind. That happened in Night Vale. It was only the end of things if you let it be.

But he was patient, contenting himself with kisses until Carlos' mouth slid away to trace the line of his jaw. Tipping his head back without hesitation, he was on the verge of humming an encouragement when Carlos nuzzled into his throat, froze there and shuddered, breath coming in shallow gasps. He must smell like prey to Carlos, he realized, the thought so electric it ripped a deep, hungry groan from the depths of his chest. It made Carlos jerk, breath hitching in surprise, but then his mouth was trailing wet, voracious kisses over Cecil's skin, his hand falling away from Cecil's face to pin both his shoulders flat to the bed.

"Oh, God, I can taste that," Carlos half-moaned into the hollow of Cecil's throat, unruly hair tickling Cecil's neck. "Your...how can you...want...?"

"Because you're Carlos," he said breathlessly as he arched up, desperate for more contact. He was so hard it hurt, but rocking his hips against the thin drag of the sheet was worse than a tease. He would have said more, pulled out every sappy, ridiculous line in his arsenal, because a flustered Carlos lost the power to argue and eventually things sank in.

Carlos kissed him silent first and then leaned back, waiting.

Slowly, ready to snap them closed again if he'd misread the situation, Cecil opened his eyes.

The whole apartment was dark, but his bedroom caught a fair amount of light from the streetlamp outside, enough that Carlos was more than a vague shape in the gloom. He could see the nervousness that had eclipsed Carlos' usual confident expression, the wonderfully familiar lines of his face, the utter _mess_ he'd made of his hair.

Carlos stilled at Cecil's soft noise of dismay, but he unwound all at once with a shaky laugh when Cecil started finger-combing his hair with a concerned frown. "Cecil," he said, voice cracking a little.

"Hm?"

"There's worse than my hair that needs fixing."

It was hard to drag his eyes away from the problem he knew he could solve, but he heard the invitation for what it was. Pushing himself up to sit back against the headboard, he dropped his gaze, trailing past Carlos' dusty lab coat, the comfortable red plaid shirt he'd taken to wearing even around the office, the...scales, like articulated plates of armor, that peeked out from beneath. Belly scales, Cecil cataloged in some distant part of his brain. The rest of him was busy staring.

He'd seen the pictures, true, but Carlos had been in a hurry and the reach of his arm was limited. Cecil's impressions had been formed piecemeal, but the full effect was startling.

Just below his hips, Carlos' body began to branch from a single trunk to a dozen restless coils or more. They were thick, powerful-looking, like a boa's solid length: all muscle. He wondered what they looked like when Carlos was in motion, whether they whipped along in ribboning curves or had the straightforward reach and drag of tentacles. He wondered if they'd be soft or rough. He wondered that in a few ways.

Carlos' breath hitched again, eyes wide and incredulous. "You...?"

Cecil felt his face heat as he gave a helpless shrug. "Well, it's not every day my boyfriend grows tentacles!"

"You...say that like it's a positive thing."

Cecil blinked. "Why wouldn't it be?"

Carlos made a strange noise then that Cecil couldn't quite interpret, not quite a hysterical giggle or entirely a groan of resignation. "Right," he said, "of course. What was I thinking?" He sounded like he was trying very hard to remain calm and was on the verge of failing spectacularly, so Cecil did the only thing he could think of that might help.

Opening his arms, he waited patiently until Carlos all but collapsed into him, head fitting naturally under Cecil's chin as Carlos melted bonelessly into Cecil's chest. All around Cecil's legs, the bed dipped and dipped again as Carlos' new limbs were pulled up gingerly after him, until Cecil was pinned and surrounded by a knot of heavy coils. Ignoring that fact, and the stiff line of his cock snugged against the reconfigured curve of Carlos' hip, was one of the most difficult things he'd done in his life, but feeling Carlos slowly ease against him was worth it.

Eventually Carlos sighed, shifting to find a more comfortable spot and not quite hesitating before rolling his long body down just once, carefully and experimentally, into the cradle of Cecil's hips. Biting back a whimper, Cecil tried not to rock up too desperately into Carlos' weight, but Carlos' soft chuckle was calm.

"I can still taste it, you know," Carlos murmured into the point of Cecil's jaw, just under his ear. "Your...pheromones, I suppose."

"Oh," Cecil sighed, rocking up again, the pads of his splayed fingers pressing hard into the warm skin of Carlos' back. "Sorry. I--if you're not comfortable...." He stilled himself when he realized Carlos wasn't answering, but then Carlos took a deep, steadying breath.

"I'm...it helps that you're comfortable. With this. That you still see me. It still _feels_ like me, but...."

"It's you," Cecil promised, running his hands down the long planes of Carlos' back to where they narrowed, skin giving way to scale. "That's what Night Vale does. It might make you _more_ of what you are, but hardly ever less, and almost never _other_."

Carlos faltered in his slow rocking, resisting the rhythmic tug of Cecil's hands long enough to lift his head with a frown. "That's...what?"

Cecil laughed, helpless and distracted. "I don't _know_ \--you're the one who decided to eat the magic snakes! So now you've got them, and I am _begging_ you to use them."

Carlos stared, mouth opening and then closing again. "I'm not sure I know how."

Grinning, Cecil slid a leg out of the knot of coils pinning him down, sheet falling free as he wrapped Carlos up in a limb of his own. "So? You're a scientist, aren't you?"

Carlos groaned, hearing exactly where Cecil was going with that, but he laughed as well. "Yeah," he said, "all right. Let's experiment."

***

Despite all of Carlos' worries and expectations, the biggest change to come from _the_ change was that they had to rearrange the furniture in the common area at the lab. It turned out his new limbs were incredibly sensitive to vibrations and incredibly paranoid of being stepped on, and watching them flinch into defensive snarls whenever anyone walked behind him made his entire team feel like giant Godzilla monsters.

There were, of course, a few other changes.

_"Also, the Night Vale Mall would like to announce the grand opening tomorrow of a brand new outlet store,"_ Cecil was saying. Carlos reached over without looking to turn the radio up, his eye still glued to his microscope. _"After much anticipation, Bob's Red Mill products will be coming to Night Vale, so be sure to check out their wide range of surprisingly tasty gluten-free products. The City Council would also like me remind you that while wheat and its by-products are still banned, its hybrids can now be applied for at City Hall with a note from your doctor, lawyer or significant other."_

Snorting softly, Carlos just barely managed not to grin as he carefully maneuvered a pipette over his slide. The rolled triticale sample had been cooked to perfection, but it appeared it needed more creamer.

The re-creation of initial conditions was delicate work.

_"You know, listeners, I myself have been thinking of making an application at City Hall,"_ Cecil said lightly; it was a testament to Carlos' skill that he managed not to jerk his hand and spoil his sample. _"Now, I know what you're thinking. 'Cecil...if all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?' As I used to tell my mother, that would depend_ entirely _on what was chasing us. But you know, I_ am _a summer, and green is a very good color on me, and I think I'd look quite fetching with a few extra frills. Well. Not literally frills--although I must say that spelt has done_ good things _for Trish Hidge, from the mayor's office. It's something to discuss with Carlos, anyway, when I get home."_

Smile back like it'd never left, Carlos tweezed a few grains of sugar onto his slide and watched the magic take hold.

Some of the changes had been worth it.


End file.
